Book Review: David Gibbins’ Novels

.
If you do NOT like history or archaeology, stop reading this review now. But if you do love these sciences – as well as good fiction writing – this is one author of fiction that you might appreciate, as the historical parts of his books are outstanding.
.
A reviewer once wrote, “What do you get when you cross Indiana Jones with Dan Brown? Answer: David Gibbins.” That sums it up.
.
David Gibbins is a leading marine archaeologist and an authority on shipwrecks and sunken cities. He did his studies in archaeology at Cambridge and has taught university courses on archaeology and ancient history in England. He now does fieldwork and writes one novel per year.
.
Gibbins’ five novels feature a modern marine archaeologist, his colleagues and support teams (many with military experience), former professors, and world-class scholars. The historical knowledge revealed in their conversations is fascinating. These stories are primarily historical detective adventures and partly thrillers, following the clues from archaeological finds or discoveries in ancient libraries to unexpected links through time.
.
The action involves a lot of travel to historic sites throughout the world, tons of ancient history lessons, and usually sinister institutions and villains somewhere in the background. Very dangerous black market grave robbers and arms dealers are often lurking. His historical research is very good, with the added imaginative fiction taking you further out.
.
At the end of each novel is an “Author’s Notes” section where he debriefs the reader by sorting fact from fiction in the story you have just read. He tells you what in the story is considered to be fairly solid history and why, briefly mentioning the documentary sources (e.g., Plutarch, Josephus, Greenlanders’ Saga, Christopher Wren, Sima Qian, Plato, various modern authors, etc., with many of these sources already mentioned in conversations within the story). Where he has added fictional content to the stories, he tells you, and it is often about actual longstanding historical rumors, puzzles, implications or speculations which he uses with a “what if?” kind of imaginary development.
.
Ideally, it might be good to read the novels in order of their publication, because the characters’ back-stories accumulate and build on one another. But you can still fully appreciate each individual novel if read out-of-order by starting with any one of them.
.
The first novel in this series is Atlantis, where they stumble into historic clues of the possible location of this legendary lost sunken city. We are taken from clues in a dusty dig in the desert of Egypt on to Plato’s legend, then to a Minoan shipwreck in the Mediterranean, and on to the Black Sea and the wreck of a long-lost Soviet nuclear submarine, then to nearby Abkhazia (a former autonomous region in the Georgian Republic USSR, and now a gangster haven). A lot of ancient history is sifted through and reviewed.
.
The next novel, Crusader Gold, finds our heroes searching for the lost menorah from the Temple in Jerusalem that Titus had brought to Rome after the Roman conquest of Judea in AD 70. After the fall of Rome it may have gone to Carthage or Byzantium. The story involves the Varangian mercenaries in Byzantium led by the historic Viking Harald Hardrada, who once even went to Jerusalem; then there is more about the crusades. Then it is the findings of maps and documents in an old English cathedral; and then startling evidence in the ice from Greenland’s medieval times as well as in the 20th century involving a Nazi agent. A lot more geography and history is covered in this one book, and you won’t believe where they end up.
.
The Lost Tomb (aka, The Last Gospel in the UK) involves an excavation at Herculaneum, which was buried along with Pompeii by Vesuvius in AD 79. Then the underwater archaeologists think they may have found the shipwreck of St. Paul. A lot of ancient Roman history is covered and speculated on, including a lot about Claudius and Pliny the Elder. There is a dive through old sewers of Rome and one into an old submerged part of London. The history of the ancient Britons who resisted the Romans is involved. And much more.
.
The Tiger Warrior starts with an archaeological dig on the Egyptian coast of the Red Sea and about the site’s actual link to the sea trade routes connecting ancient Rome and the East. It talks about the lost Roman legions of Crassus that were defeated by the Parthians in 53 BC at Carrhae and whose survivors were led into slavery at Margiana (Merv, Turkmenistan); about India and the British colonial experience there including the 1879 Rampa Rebellion in southeastern India; about the overland Silk Road, which takes us high up in the mountains of Central Asia in Kyrgyzstan and the Pamir Knot, then to northeastern Afghanistan’s lapis lazuli mines. The tomb of China’s First Emperor casts its shadow over the action.
.
The fifth novel, The Mask of Troy, I just finished reading yesterday. The cover photo shows the golden “Mask of Agamemnon” that Heinrich Schliemann revealed at Mycenae in 1876. (Caveat about Schliemann: a controversial figure, he was a clumsy digger and boastful, but he showed the world that there might be some historical truth within old myths such as Troy; Gibbins debriefs us on him, warts and all, at the end.) This novel takes us underwater to naval wrecks from the harbor off Troy dating from the 1200 BC Trojan War to the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign. Nazi death camp experiences yield important clues to the mystery. There is speculation on Homer’s lost epic poem that followed The Iliad, the one that describes the actual Fall of Troy and about how horrific that final battle was.
.
Gibbins is getting better all the time, and I highly recommend his books. His five novels thus far, in inexpensive paperback, are:
.
Atlantis (2005)
Crusader Gold (2006)
The Lost Tomb (in the UK, The Last Gospel) (2008)
The Tiger Warrior (2009)
The Mask of Troy (2010)
.

Book Review: Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War (2010) by Karl Marlantes

.
This is a great Vietnam War tale – and although it is a work of fiction it is still authentic in spirit and in its every detail. Matterhorn is the name of a fictitious hill within the story in the Khe Sanh area of I Corps, South Vietnam. This is the best novel that I have ever read to come out of the Vietnam experience and one of the best war novels I’ve ever read. I highly recommend it.
.
The author, Karl Marlantes, has been there. He was a highly decorated Marine platoon commander in Vietnam, earning the Navy Cross (the only higher award for Navy and Marine Corps personnel being the Medal of Honor), the Bronze Star, two Purple Hearts, ten Air Medals and two Navy Commendation Medals for valor. Keeping in mind the notorious stinginess of the Marine Corps in awarding medals of any kind, his achievements are noteworthy. Marlantes is also a Yale graduate and a Rhodes scholar. He spent over 30 years working on this, his debut novel.
.
The novel gives you the experience of the Vietnam War, the insane horrors of combat, the constant filth, both the extremes of the tropical heat to the shivering cold nights when soaking wet and bone-weary. Race relation problems of the late 1960s are handled very well, and also the phenomena of “fragging” an incompetent officer or NCO. For Marines planning to stay in the Corps, there was a distinction between the more professional “career men” versus the “lifers.” A lifer was defined as “someone who can’t make it on the outside,” someone with enough rank to make your life miserable for no good reason, and these guys were sometimes targets of fraggings. The dialogues and the profanities are exactly right.
.
The stupid politics of that war is everywhere a major theme, as lives are wasted taking hard-won territory only to abandon it soon after. On occasion an officer would think more about their own career advancements than the losses or hardships of their men. Those being killed and maimed are usually teenagers who haven’t even lived their lives yet. The book sometimes makes you very angry, but it is ultimately redeeming.
.
The protagonist, 2nd Lt. Mellas, evolves from a spoiled college kid with military-political ambitions to a good combat officer and a compassionate commander of men. He learns from both the enlisted and commissioned Marines who have been in-country before him. The other characters are very well drawn and very authentic, especially Lt. Hawke, the kind of guy that men will follow anywhere. The humor in the midst of horror also comes through at times.
.
There were many details in the story that really brought back vivid memories. For example, the concussion from the explosion of in-coming enemy mortar rounds sending a wave of pressure against your eyeballs as well as your eardrums. Also well-written are the times when you think that you will certainly die soon – e.g., Cortell and Jermain discuss Pascal’s Wager, although they have never heard of Pascal or his philosophical “wager” about what awaits us after death. We all knew about that bet in some way of our own and were forced to think about it. That is haunting.
.
Before reading the novel, definitely read the “Glossary of Weapons, Technical Terms, Slang and Jargon” in back, and keep a bookmarker in place there so that you can refer back to it while reading. The Vietnam War had its own unique jargon, but so did the Navy and Marine Corps, and so a lot of it is esoteric to those services. But even I had to look over this Glossary many times for things such as radio call-sign protocol details, etc.
.
Also, keep handy the three pages in front of the novel for the fictitious “Chain of Command and Principal Characters” chart (with their radio call-signs in italics), and also the two map pages: “Bravo Company’s Area of Operation” and “Matterhorn and Helicopter Hill.” The USMC units in this novel are fictitious, in that they are real Marine (reserve) units but they were never in Vietnam. Also, the map adds the fictitious Vietnam hills Matterhorn, Helicopter Hill, Eiger and Sky Cap, and this map goes farther west toward the Laotian border than it did in reality beyond Khe Sanh. Read the author’s disclaimer on the copyright page for the full details about his fiction versus the reality.
.
I think this novel is going to be a war classic.
.